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Senior Technical Program Manager

Graphcore·London·Posted 32 days ago

Graphcore designs Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) purpose-built to accelerate machine learning and AI workloads. Graphcore is hiring a Senior Technical Program Manager, based in London. This is a program management opportunity in one of the UK's most active AI semiconductors companies.

About Graphcore

At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute.We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack - from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale.As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem.To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world.We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.

Job Summary

As a Senior Technical Project Manager focussed on Platform you will play a key role in bridging the technical and management domains of teams responsible for the planning and delivery of solutions for workload management, systems management & observability, integrated hardware/software quality assurance and cloud development.

You will collaborate with highly technical engineering leads, and multi-functional teams across systems, software, operations, and product to support the flawless delivery of our fully integrated hardware and software AI systems.

Responsibilities and Duties

  • Serve as the primary liaison for the technical teams in multi-functional discussions, ensuring alignment on project requirements.
  • Support the planning, development and management of project schedules and deliverables to achieve programme objectives on schedule.
  • Ensure each team’s programme deliverables satisfy requirements and are fulfilled by the engineering work.
  • Monitor and track dependencies both within Platform and with other programme teams, communicating any near-term inputs for the individual team backlogs.
  • Represent Platform in programme management syncs and reviews. Efficiently aid teams’ navigation of scope changes to minimize impacts on project timelines and outcomes.
  • Work with Release Management and Engineering teams to minimise time-to-delivery and remove blockers for developing at scale.
  • High-level technical understanding of the software, QA, cloud development solutions so that you can contribute meaningfully to priority discussions.
  • Proactively identify risks and dependencies, support the teams’ development of mitigation strategies, and inform/escalate issues.
  • Provide regular updates on program status, highlighting challenges and proposing solutions to internal partners, facilitating informed decision-making.
  • Facilitate process for internal compute resource allocations among engineering teams.
  • Continually improve processes, optimize workflow, and maintain the highest quality levels.

Skills and Experience

Essential:

  • Bachelor's degree in a relevant subject or equivalent experience.
  • Experience of working in programs with a strong software and hardware mix.
  • Track record of working with Agile project development practices.
  • Excellent communicator, translating complex situations into plain narrative.
  • Outstanding facilitator to help resolve complex issues.
  • Great organiser of people, processes, and product plans.
  • Experience working with Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence) to represent complex work hierarchies and dependencies.
  • An ability to work independently without daily oversight in projects that can rapidly evolve and change.
  • A demonstrable understanding and application of knowledge and skills managing dependencies, priorities, risks, issues, impacts and constraints.
  • A proven track record of delivering technical output, perhaps as an individual contributor, manager or project manager, especially in software development.

Desirable:

  • Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience including at least 3 years in a technical program management role, ideally within multi-functional teams.
  • Understanding of AI or HPC systems and how each component interacts with the system.
  • Knowledge of data centre design, infrastructure provisioning and management.
  • Experience working with satellite teams.



Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

Sponsorship

Applicants for this position must hold the right to work in the UK. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or support for visa applications.

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About Graphcore

Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI semiconductor company founded in 2016 by serial semiconductor entrepreneurs Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles. Toon previously led XMOS and Picochip, while Knowles co-founded Element14 (acquired by Broadcom) and Icera (acquired by NVIDIA for $435M). The company developed Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), novel AI accelerators designed from the ground up for machine learning workloads, alongside the proprietary Poplar graph programming framework. Graphcore raised $767M in total funding, reaching a $2.77B valuation, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Amadeus, Microsoft, and others. In July 2024, SoftBank Group acquired Graphcore for approximately $500M to $600M. The company continues to operate from Bristol with plans to expand its UK headcount to 750.

Stage: AcquiredBristol
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